From garage sale to Cooperstown: The saga of Cleveland’s John Adams and his Hall of Fame drum
David Schmidt
Published Apr 07, 2026
COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — It was July 22, 2020, two days before the start of a strange, shortened baseball season, and John Adams sat beside his trusty sidekick in his home office in Parma, Ohio. He wasn’t going to be at the ballpark — no one would be, aside from the players, coaches, reporters, certain team staffers and a collection of cardboard cutouts — so John was eager to talk to anyone about baseball.
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He grabbed a mallet, wound up …
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The drumbeat didn’t pack quite the same punch in his 93-year-old home that it did during a ninth-inning rally before a capacity crowd on a crisp autumn evening.
Baseball, and especially the ballpark experience, was missing from his life in a way few other fans could grasp. Yet even if the league were to make an exception for him to attend games in the midst of the pandemic, he said he’d turn it down. He wasn’t passing through the turnstiles until the gates were reopened for everyone.
He didn’t know it at that time but he had already attended his last game.
John and his drum were inseparable until the very end, when his health deteriorated but he still tuned in for every Guardians first pitch. The drum only left his side once, when a team employee handed it off to Patrick Carney, drummer for the Black Keys, at John’s perch atop the left-field bleachers.
That moment came on Opening Day 2021, and it was perfectly imperfect. There was no duplicating the magic John and his drum created for nearly a half-century, whether it was a substitute drummer (even a Grammy-winning rocker) or an audio recording, which the team used for the 2020 campaign.
The drum now rests at the bottom of a display locker on the third floor of a brick building in a quaint town in central New York, surrounded by bats and gloves and uniform tops. Since its arrival earlier in November, baseball fans from across the globe have filtered through the Your Team Today corridor at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and spotted John’s companion, the 26-inch bass drum that barely fits within the walls of the exhibit.
It’s fitting, considering John would regale strangers with stories about how he had shaken hands, posed for pictures and chatted with people at the ballpark from every continent — except for Antarctica, he’d say, because penguins didn’t buy bleacher seats.
John never would have imagined a residency at the Hall. He was too humble. He embodied what it’s like to be a fan, to find one’s passion and treasure every breath spent doing it. And there were a lot of breaths over the course of nearly 4,000 Cleveland baseball games spanning nearly a half-century.
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John could have dumped his drum for a better model along the way, but he refused. Jordan Gauthier, a drum architect and expert, suggests it was crafted in the 1930s, a Ludwig-model single-tension bass drum. Perhaps it was used in a marching band, or used as an outlet for someone frustrated during the Great Depression.
John stumbled upon the drum in the early ‘70s, a marriage formed at a garage sale. No one would have envisioned such a prosperous union. It came as part of a set, but John, a member of the Parma High School pep band and supporter of The Music Settlement and its music therapy program, really just wanted the drum. He paid $25.
The drumming from the bleachers dated back to Aug. 24, 1973. John received advance approval from the Indians’ PR staff, but when he entered the ballpark, a police officer stopped him and asked what he planned to do with a big, old drum in a big, old, empty ballpark.
John was 21, an avid Indians fan who spent his childhood riding the Union Avenue No. 15 bus with his dad to the corner of E. 4th Street and Prospect Avenue. They’d walk past Otto Moser’s restaurant with the pickle jars in the front window and continue toward the cavern on the lakeshore. When Municipal Stadium came into view, John would say, everything morphed from black and white to vivid color, like when Dorothy opened the door in the Wizard of Oz.
By 1973, John was an expert in Cleveland baseball fandom. He had spent hundreds of hours smacking the metal bleachers with his hands. There had to be a better way, he thought, to generate noise, to make the crowd of a few thousand sound as if the deserted venue was filled.
Enter the drum.
John had better, more expensive drums — including a Slingerland Radio King signed by the 1975 team — but none he trusted more for his Municipal Stadium mission. He said if it rained, his mallets would carve right through the cat-skin canvas, so the team constructed the Adams Awning above his seat to shield him from the elements.
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On that first Friday night 50 years ago, as 16 East Tech students filed into the row in front of him, John suffered stage fright. One of the kids turned around and asked in a snooty tone, “You’re not going to hit that, are you?”
John didn’t want to disturb anyone. A man making a beer run urged him to relocate to the back of Section 55, the ideal setting for him to bang away in peace. A group of six people walking past offered encouragement.
It caught the attention of Bob Sudyk, a reporter who wrote in the Cleveland Press: “Adams is one of the chosen few who can thump a drum and receive a standing ovation.” That night, John said: “I’ve found the perfect place and I love it.” Sudyk suggested John and his drum would become ballpark staples, and John didn’t want to make him a liar, so he came back, again and again and again, for the rest of his life.
“People who love to bam away on a drum have a following,” Sudyk wrote. “But the following is usually in pursuit. People who play drums often are evicted by landlords who cancel apartment leases, wives who leave home for mother, dogs who bark and neighbors who call the cops.”
John started beating the drum when the opposing team’s reliever warmed up. That night, Cleveland scored three runs off Texas hurler Charlie Hudson.
“The bleacher fans thought I had psyched him out with the drum,” John said.
He quickly developed a routine; he’d buy a 50-cent bleacher ticket and trek to his spot in front of the brick wall at the top of the section, where he composed the soundtrack to Cleveland baseball. John became a fixture, the unofficial team musician everyone wanted to meet.
“All it takes at a ballgame is to lean over and start talking to people and you’ve got a new friend,” he said all those years ago.
That was his favorite part of the gig. He’d gush about how he could sit at a game and solve the world’s problems with a fellow fan he met two innings earlier. He didn’t care about the publicity that followed him. He simply cherished the camaraderie. He’d say the ballpark was his “escape from reality” and “a magical land.”
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It afforded him some unforgettable opportunities.
The team handed out a bobblehead of John in his patented white button-down and jeans, holding a baseball and a pair of mallets while leaning on the drum. Great Lakes Brewing Company crafted a beer, Rally Drum Red Ale, in his honor.
He made TV appearances, showing up at the ballpark for the 5 a.m. news on Opening Day. John would shout “Happy New Year” and thwack away. He joined the team’s local radio affiliate for its live broadcasts on the Gateway Plaza and the team’s fan club for its regular meetings.
He attended Len Barker’s perfect game in 1981, three All-Star Games, three World Series spectacles. He marched with the Ohio State band during a pregame performance at Jacobs Field.
He sat through teeth-chattering frigid, flurry-filled spring nights when you could see chunks of ice bobbing in Lake Erie. He sat through sweltering summer afternoons, sporting a tank top and clutching the mallets with sweaty paws. He sat through 100-loss seasons in a mostly abandoned venue and through hallmark October evenings with 40,000 people hanging on every note he hit.
He was the last one out of the stands at the old place in October 1993. He journeyed to Milwaukee in 2007, when the Indians “hosted” the Angels 400-some miles northwest of Cleveland after Mother Nature mercilessly dumped piles of snow on the lakefront in early April. In 2011, for his 3,000th game, John stood at home plate and swung his drum like a bat to hit a ceremonial first pitch from Joe Charboneau.
All of it with the same drum, because John refused to break their bond.
He’d carry the drum to his neighbor’s house every year or two, where Kurt Nicolay, a welder, would fuse its tension rods back together. Kurt would tell him he needed a new drum, but John was unwavering.
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“Nope, I want this one.”
“OK,” Kurt would reply, “we’ll make it work.”
Much of its black paint has worn off. There’s a chunk of its wooden rim missing. The tension rods have seen better days. There are a couple of yellow smiley face stickers on its base, and some eroded signatures that have become illegible.
John often said the drum wasn’t worth much but was invaluable to him, even if he once estimated spending $200 a year on maintenance.
He was climbing toward milestones he never imagined. Four thousand games. Fifty years.
John didn’t need the urging from Sudyk or the team’s PR staff to make this a habit. It’s all he ever wanted to do, the only place he ever wanted to be. Sudyk once wrote, after a sleepy, one-hit loss in May 1978, Cleveland’s eighth defeat in 12 games, that “even the drummer is staying home.” But he was mistaken. He had ditched a picnic and driven 50 miles to attend the game, even though, as John said, “There wasn’t much to beat about.” John joked that Sudyk “probably was asleep like most of the other 19,000 there.”
He’d pack the drum in his car — he used to have a van on which a close friend named Harold painted “Follow me to Indians Baseball” — and he would head downtown. He’d park in a lot behind the bleachers at the old stadium. When the team moved into Jacobs Field in 1994, he’d park on E. 18th next to the Wolstein Center, across from the Salvation Army. He’d lug the drum down Carnegie Avenue to the ballpark, stopping to talk to vendors and fans along the way. In more recent years, as it became more demanding to lug a 26-inch drum a long distance, he had a spot in the Gateway East Garage beside the ballpark.
On the 49th anniversary of that first game, the team inducted John into its Distinguished Hall of Fame, an exclusive group of 12 members, most of whom were broadcasters or executives. They placed a bronze replica of the drum atop his green bleacher seat in Heritage Park, a permanent reminder of the music they made together.
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That drumbeat lurked in the background of every sacred moment, every clutch hit, every walk-off, every key pitch in a postseason game when every pause in the action was accompanied by a spike in blood pressure and that familiar sound.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The players were missing that presence during the 2020 season. In an empty ballpark, the audio recording the team occasionally blared on the speakers didn’t strike the same note. When a team staffer relayed that message to John, he supplied mallets that the club stored in the dugout as good-luck charms.
John passed away in January. He willed the drum to the Guardians.
John Adams was the heartbeat of Cleveland baseball for five decades, drumming at more than 3,700 @CleGuardians games.
We’re proud to display Adams’ bass drum and honor his memory in Cooperstown.
— National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum ⚾ (@baseballhall) November 16, 2023
A few weeks back, team historian Jeremy Feador shoved the drum — and the bat (belonging to Bob Feller) that Babe Ruth leaned on in his final appearance at Yankee Stadium — into the back of a red Hyundai Santa Fe at 3 a.m. He picked up a pair of copilots and headed east.
Since John’s death, the drum had been stored in the team’s offices, but those are being renovated. It needed a new home, even if only for a couple years, until the Guardians design its future display space.
After six and a half hours, Feador pulled up beside a grassy courtyard with sculptures of a pitcher and catcher. He pulled the drum out of the trunk and stuck it on a slab of gray concrete in front of the building entrance before snapping a series of photos and transporting it inside.
Cleveland was a charter member of the American League in 1901. The franchise has a rich catalog of history and an endless supply of memorabilia and artifacts, some of which reside at the Cooperstown museum.
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Tom Shieber, the Hall’s curator, showcased the maroon-collared wool uniform Nap Lajoie wore in 1910, when he battled Ty Cobb for the batting crown and a Chalmers model 30 automobile; a pair of black Feller cleats with metal spikes from his final start of 1938, when the 19-year-old set a team record with 18 strikeouts (a feat Corey Kluber would match 77 years later with Feller’s widow in attendance); a base used during the 1948 World Series at Municipal Stadium; the baseball Jim Thome slugged during the 1999 ALDS, when he became the first player in postseason history with multiple grand slams; a photo of the participants in a 1911 All-Star benefit held for the family of the late Addie Joss, with Jack Graney featured on both ends of the panoramic shot because the Cleveland outfielder raced from one side to the other during the 15 seconds it took the tripod to rotate.
Elsewhere in the museum, there’s a baseball from Early Wynn’s 300th victory, a ball from Feller’s Opening Day no-hitter, a ’48 championship ring, the bat Sandy Alomar Jr. used to swat the decisive home run in the 1997 All-Star Game, the jersey Frank Robinson wore for his first game as the league’s first Black manager, a rare Lajoie card and a medal honoring Neal Ball for converting the league’s first unassisted triple play.
There’s a trophy Cy Young’s teammates handed him on his 41st birthday, a “Go Joe Charboneau” record — the Section 36 track reached No. 3 on the local charts — from his award-winning rookie season, a $20 auxiliary field box ticket to the 1981 All-Star Game and an arm-warming sleeve Feller’s mother fashioned for him in 1934.
In that display locker resides Rajai Davis’ navy uniform top from Game 7 of the 2016 World Series, Shane Bieber’s cap from when he claimed All-Star Game MVP honors in Cleveland in 2019 and the dirt-stained base Jay Bruce tagged for his walk-off double that pushed the Indians’ record-setting win streak to 22 games in 2017.
So much Cleveland history — and now the drum is a small (well, rather large) part of it.
At the entrance of the third level sits the Sacred Ground exhibit, where visitors are greeted by seven fabric maché figures that honor some of the most renowned fans in the sport’s history. There’s Hilda Chester and her trademark cowbell at Dodgers games, Harry Thobe, known for dancing in the aisles in a suit at Reds games and Lolly Hopkins, who shouted into a megaphone in Boston. Several Hall officials agreed John would fit in with this group, a fundamental component of the fan experience in his city.
Before the Guardians’ home opener this year, the club’s first game at Progressive Field since John’s passing, fans streamed to his empty seat atop the bleachers, where the team had nailed a plaque to the wall and left a wreath of bright blue, red and white flowers that surrounded a logo of his initials and a couple of mallets. It wasn’t just the Cleveland diehards who marched to Section 182 to pay tribute.
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One fan who hailed from Houston remembered Adams and his drum from a tour of the league’s 30 ballparks a quarter-century earlier. He returned for a game in 2017, sat in the bleachers and was reacquainted with John’s work. He attended the 2023 home opener and made John’s shrine his first stop. John’s passion and loyalty resonated beyond Cleveland.
In 2013, as his retirement tour rolled through Progressive Field, Yankees closer Mariano Rivera asked to meet John and tap the drum. A decade later, both are honored in the Hall of Fame.
In a museum full of reminders of icons such as Ruth, Young, Mays, Cobb, Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, Hank Aaron, Lou Gehrig and Rickey Henderson, there’s now an item that represents a devoted fan who only had a bird’s-eye view of the field, but was so prominent to the franchise.
The Guardians will unveil the John Adams Bleachers at Progressive Field in April. His legacy lives on — in Cleveland and in Cooperstown.
(Top photo: Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images)
